Canonical urls - do my web pages need them?
-
Hello,
I'm going round in circles with this issue, so hopefully someone can help...
The Moz crawl of my website lists a number of pages as "missing canonical url". The pages are all different and do not have similar content.
Do I need to add a canonical url to each page? My agency quoted the following (x referencing this page: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/consolidate-duplicate-urls)
-
list itemYou would use Canonical URLs if:
-
list item"...you have a single page that's accessible by multiple URLs, or different pages with similar content (for example, a page with both a mobile and a desktop version), Google sees these as duplicate versions of the same page."
-
list itemThis is not the case here and so we would not propose to change anything. We could add Canonical URLs if the client feels that it is critical which occurs an additional cost.
Any help / advice much appreciated.
Thanks
-
-
@paintedbrickdigital hello! thanks for this info. i'll follow up with my agency and see where I get to! have a lovely day...
-
@rj_dale if I'm reading your issue correctly, all the pages/content is unique and you simply need to ensure that you are canonical-ing back to itself, ensuring that the pages have a similar tag pointed to that unique page itself in the <head>:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.website.com/page/" />
Basically, having it point back to itself if it's a unique page is a good thing, most CMSs handle this, but sometimes creation variables stop that from happening.
Hope that answers your question (if I'm understanding what you were asking correctly)!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Rel: Canonical - checking advice provided by SEO agency
Hey all, We have two brands one bigger and one smaller that are on 2 different domains. We are wanting to repost some of the articles from the smaller brand to the bigger brand and what was a bit of curve ball, our SEO agency advised us NOT to put a rel: canonical on the reposted articles on the bigger brands site. This is counter to what i'm used to and just wanted to confirm with the gurus out there if this is good advice or bad advice. Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | Redooo0 -
Content Issues: Duplicate Content
Hi there
Technical SEO | | Kingagogomarketing
Moz flagged the following content issues, the page has duplicate content and missing canonical tags.
What is the best solution to do? Industrial Flooring » IRL Group Ltd
https://irlgroup.co.uk/industrial-flooring/ Industrial Flooring » IRL Group Ltd
https://irlgroup.co.uk/index.php/industrial-flooring Industrial Flooring » IRL Group Ltd
https://irlgroup.co.uk/index.php/industrial-flooring/0 -
Unsolved Moz Pro crawl signaling missing canonical which are not?
Hi,
Moz Pro | | rolandvintners
I'm trying MozPro considering using it.
One of the tool which is appealing is the crawl and insights.
After quick use, I really question many of the alerts, for instance, I got a "missing canonical tag" on this url: https://vintners.co/wine/grawu_gto#2020 but when I check my markup, there's clearly a canonical tag: <link rel="canonical" href="https://vintners.co/wine/grawu_gto"> Anybody can explain?
I asked Moz Pro staff when being onboarded but didn't get an answer...
Honestly, I'm questioning the value of these crawls, or may be I miss something?0 -
Product Pages Outranking Category Pages
Hi, We are noticing an issue where some product pages are outranking our relevant category pages for certain keywords. For a made up example, a "heavy duty widgets" product page might rank for the keyword phrase Heavy Duty Widgets, instead of our Heavy Duty Widgets category page appearing in the SERPs. We've noticed this happening primarily in cases where the name of the product page contains an at least partial match for the desired keyword phrase we want the category page to rank for. However, we've also found isolated cases where the specified keyword points to a completely irrelevent pages instead of the relevant category page. Has anyone encountered a similar issue before, or have any ideas as to what may cause this to happen? Let me know if more clarification of the question is needed. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | ShawnHerrick0 -
Home Page Not Ranking... Need an EXPERT
Hi, for about a year now, our home page seems to have been "removed" from Google (except for our branded keywords). The home page is clearly indexed, but none of the keywords for the home page rank in the top 500 (again, except for our brand, trophycentral). Other pages in the site are fine and we rank in the top 10 positions for hundreds of keywords. We are also okay on Yahoo and Bing. So the issue is the home page from non-branded words. There have been no manual penalties, but since the words, such as trophies and trophies and awards are all but gone, something is going on. It has been almost exactly a year now and I have tried everything from removing backlinks (although I still can't tell which are "bad links", to changing titles, to improving speed and structure. I have had quite a few really nice people try to help, but their suggestions don't seem to work or are too vague. I really need an expert as the impact to the business of not having a home page performing is very damaging. Thank you!!!
Technical SEO | | trophycentraltrophiesandawards0 -
Redirect non-www if using canonical url?
I have setup my website to use canonical urls on each page to point to the page i wish Google to refer to. At the moment, my non-www domain name is not redirected to www domain. Is this required if i have setup the canonical urls? This is the tag i have on my index.php page rel="canonical" href="http://www.mydomain.com.au" /> If i browse to http://mydomain.com.au should the link juice pass to http://www.armourbackups.com.au? Will this solve duplicate content problems? Thanks
Technical SEO | | blakadz0 -
Wordpress URL weirdness - why is google registering non-pretty URLS?
I've noticed in my stats that google is indexing some non-pretty URLs from my wordpress-based blog.
Technical SEO | | peterdbaron
For instance, this URL is appearing google search: http://www.admissionsquest.com/onboardingschools/index.php?p=439 It should be: http://www.admissionsquest.com/onboardingschools/2009/01/do-american-boarding-schools-face-growing-international-competition.html Last week I added the plugin Redirection in order to consolidate categories & tags. Any chance that this has something to do with it? Recs on how to solve this? Fyi - I've been using pretty URLS with wordpress from the very beginning and this is the first time that I've seen this issue. Thanks in advance for your help!0